Looking back to the time architectural practices first began to proliferate in India, one sees that they always operated within an ecosystem of practice, academia, and association. We can trace this to the 1930s, when the Indian Institute of Architects (IIA) was set up, which in turn emerged from the alumni of the Bombay School of Art. Teachers at the school were the most prolific practitioners in the country, and students made the easy transition from learning to apprenticeship, to setting up their own practices. Even patrons, largely non-state (in the penultimate decades before independence) aligned themselves with the architects in a collegial association. The Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects and their annual lectures became the mouthpieces of collective praxis, as the many presidential speeches show. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing, knowledge flowed centripetally.

In the years after independence, these bonds became looser as the nation-state became the chief patron. While private wealth and industry provided steady work for architects all over the country, the IIA still continued to remain the platform of discourse and dissemination – an internal professional rumination, largely distanced from changing politics and culture in the country, especially from the seventies onwards. While students of architecture did briefly take political stances during the Emergency, practice remained unaffected.

By the end of the eighties, with the rise of the patron as aspirant or speculator, and, a few years later with the effects of liberalization made flesh, the erstwhile associations started to crumble, the ecosystem became unstable, and in some ways, unsustainable. Architectural practices became myriad and diffuse, working centrifugally, aligning into various smaller constellations. The influence of the IIA waned, while the Council of Architecture, mandated to look after the concerns of practice in the early seventies through an Act of Parliament, by and large, came to focus on monitoring architectural education that had, by the turn of the millennium, boomed with colleges springing up in all parts of the country.

Education too, dispersed in the wake of overarching Modernism’s eclipse and the acceptance of pluralism fueled both by the rise of critical theoretical positions in architecture as well as a dilution of the rigor that functionalism once imposed on its practitioners. Critical discussions on Indian architecture have since been restricted to a few conferences and the odd polemic in architecture magazines (which also proliferated since the eighties, but have mainly been showpieces of architecture for the rich and famous). Books on Indian architecture, when concentrating on the contemporary, are in the form of monographs, vanity publications or, when serious, about urban change. Vistara, the exhibition, in 1986 was comprehensive, but an overview of Indian architecture. Three decades on, there has been no serious review of the state of the architectural profession in India.

.....

Mustansir Dalvi: Why is this the right time to take stock of the state of architecture in India today?

Rahul Mehrotra: For several important reasons: The first is clearly to correct or compensate for the absolute silence in the discussion of architecture in the last decade or two. For good reason, our discussions and our focus have been on urban questions, or at least we have approached our discussion about architecture through the lens of the city. Further, the architecture that has been celebrated in India since the liberalization of our economy has been the "architecture of indulgence" – weekend homes, restaurants, resorts and corporate offices; and, as an extension of this limited spectrum of what is celebrated, the discussion is focused on material, craft, and texture in an almost fetishistic manner. While this is productive in its own way – it removes the perception of the usefulness of architecture away from the public. All such programs that, while they are crucial crucibles for architectural innovation, touch a very small fragment of our population.

Lastly, in India, the State has more or less given up the responsibility of projecting an "idea of India" through the built and physical environment as it had done in the post-independence era when several state capitals, government and educational campuses were built across the country. Today the major state-directed projects are highways, flyovers, airports, telecommunications networks and electricity grids which connect urban centers but don’t contribute to determining or guiding their physical structure. The State is now obsessed with a statistical architecture – GDP, etc. So the idea of this exhibition, through focusing on public architecture is to bring this issue into focus and question the State’s role as patron for architecture, or more broadly the role of the architect in contemporary India society.

MD: Do you project the exhibition as a historical unfolding or a critical deconstruction of Indian architecture?

RM: The exhibition is interestingly both a historic unfolding as well as critical deconstruction – a productive hybrid, which we believe, results from multiple curatorial hands.

Kaiwan Mehta: The exhibition should be imagined as a diagram of the curatorial team’s own experiences as practitioners, critics and theorists – at one point, it emphasizes memory and history, but on the other it also makes tangible and hopefully discernible the living chaos of the present. We are at the threshold of classifying and clarifying the chaos that may be accorded to the present state of architectural manifestations and, rather than a rush to classification, it is important to understand what the presence of chaos or multiplicity means. Naturally this creates an ambiguity in terms of our roles and our instrumentality as designers and so this is a condition that’s worth interrogating productively. In that sense, the exhibition shuffles between the protocols of established histories and establishing arguments in light of dramatic historical shifts and the need for newer criteria or lenses of analysis.

The architect as a professional figure will also be drawn out in the exhibition and the events that surround the show, as against only talking about architecture and buildings, per se. The architect as individual needs to be recovered, not as a hero or a socialite, but as a technocrat, a social being, a political entity, a professional contributor and a public intellectual.

.....

Ranjit Hoskote: We have structured the exhibition into three distinct zones. In the first zone, we have – for the first time in living memory – quantified the state of the profession using a rigorous research methodology and by reference to data aggregations concerning the number and nature of architecture schools in India, their regional distribution, the number and location of architectural practices, areas that lack schools or practices or both and where, even so, architectural activity seems to be go on. We have also confronted, here, the issue of the gender asymmetry in the domain, with women and men equally represented in architecture schools but women fading out of the picture in the profession as such. This zone is articulated as a critical review, testifying to the verifiable actualities of conditions as they prevail in the profession.

In the second zone, we switch gear and trace a rich historical arc through the heroic period of early postcolonial modernity, invoking a range of presences, encounters and experiments, and the close relationship between the profession and the nation-building project. This zone takes the form of a survey, intended to resurrect many achievements and struggles that are now taken for granted, and to provide a richly active sense of context for contemporary endeavors.

In the third zone, we switch gear yet again and develop a group portrait of contemporary practices, having chosen 80 projects that address larger questions of social needs and infrastructure, and re-dedicate architecture to its social and cultural commitments, instead of merely following in the wake of a developer-driven model of progress and built form. This third and concluding zone is proposed as an observatory or a predictive platform where we chart emergent vectors, embodying our hopes for the future of architecture in India.